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08.27.13

Facebook Reveals Government Data Requests

Joerg Koch/AP

In an era where governments are collecting massive amounts of telecom and Internet data, Facebook is at least trying to have some transparency. The company released a partial list of numbers that detail the data-collection requests it receives from governments around the world. It's no surprise that the United States has the most requests out of the 25,000 Facebook revealed. In the first six months of 2013, the government had roughly 12,000 requests targeting about 21,000 accounts. India had the second highest number of requests at 3,245. But, the U.S. government doesn't allow the disclosure of certain types of requests so it's not clear how big the numbers really are.